Raten

Raten is one of the three distinct people first encountered within the body publicly known as Vorden. He is the trio's aggressive combat specialist and Sil's fiercely protective companion, but later revelations establish that Raten's original body died in the Blade Temple and that his consciousness survived through a rare mind-transfer ability. His subsequent existence spans Sil's body, a humanoid-beast host, and a later consenting Blade vessel shared with Vorden and Shiro; these are changes of vessel, not transformations of Raten's original body. (Chapters 44, 69, 629–633, 667–668, 1168–1178, and 1706)

Biography

The fighter in the chair

Raten first appears when second-year students have restrained the body everyone calls Vorden. After Layla touches it, the shared Blade copy ability acquires her telekinesis and helps break the restraints; Raten then reveals himself by fighting with markedly greater cruelty than Vorden, breaking one opponent's limbs with telekinetically controlled objects and announcing his return. The later view inside the mind explains the change: Raten, Vorden, and Sil are separate consciousnesses in a dark mental space, and whoever occupies its illuminated chair controls the physical body. Vorden normally handles communication, while Raten is entrusted with fighting and voluntarily returns the chair when the danger passes. (Chapters 44 and 69)

Raten's approach is driven by survival and retaliation rather than Vorden's restraint. On the red-portal planet he castigates Vorden for risking their shared body, takes the chair, and kills a Rattaclaw with an unnecessarily severe array of earth spikes because it injured them. He later argues that they should kill the wounded Ian for the crystal that could help them escape, but Vorden refuses; in another crisis Raten warns against remaining in a portal expedition likely to kill them. These disputes show that control of the same body does not erase independent judgment: Raten pushes for ruthless solutions, yet Vorden can deny him the chair and remains the usual decision-maker. (Chapters 65, 69, 78–87)

The shared body also gives Raten access to copied abilities, but the power is not uniquely his. Contact copies an ability for twenty-four hours, and the presence of all three minds permits three abilities to be retained at once. Raten contributes the timing and combat instinct needed to exploit them: during the class-five beast fight he takes control to charge a single spirit spear with the enhanced mental-cell supply obtained from Logan and Cia, waits for a decisive opening, and releases the amplified attack before returning control to Vorden. By contrast, Sil can wield the body's powers at a scale neither Raten nor Vorden can match, establishing Raten as the specialist in practical close combat rather than the source of the trio's greatest raw power. (Chapters 133, 241, and 251–259)

Raten's threats to seize control also conceal a protective boundary. When Vorden considers opposing Quinn in a dangerous plan, Raten says he would have tried to take the body and stop him because he will not permit a suicide mission. He wants to fight in the inter-base tournament and mocks Vorden's deliberately weak performance, but the possibility of drawing the Blade family's attention frightens him into accepting concealment. His bravado therefore develops under two pressures: he craves the bodily freedom and combat Vorden limits, while both men fear being reclaimed by the institution that made their shared existence possible. (Chapter 287)

The Blade Temple and a chosen disappearance

Outside battle, Raten repeatedly asks for time in control, treating a body of his own as an unrealised ordinary life rather than only a weapon. Vorden admits that he normally lets Raten out only to fight, though Raten also uses control to socialise and flirt. When their path returns to Blade Island, however, that desire is displaced by fear: the sight of the Temple and its children makes Raten demand that Vorden leave, while Sil relives the trauma that broke him. Hilston's staged household deepens Raten's contempt; he calls it a fake family and recognises that the roles of parent, sibling, and grandparent have been imposed by Hilston, even though the people share his blood. (Chapters 375, 620, and 623)

The Temple memories reveal why Raten reacted differently from his companions. Faced as a child with a trial that told Blade students to kill one another, he accepts its lethal premise before the others and kills Jeremy after copying an ability from a captive. Sil ultimately overpowers and kills both Raten and Vorden on the beach. Only afterward does the corpus establish that the mind-transfer ability moved their consciousnesses into Sil's surviving body, meaning the academy body publicly identified as Vorden was Sil's original body and Raten had already lost his own. The revelation does not excuse Raten's first killing, but it recasts his later aggression and terror of captivity as responses shaped by an institution that forced children to choose between murder and death. (Chapters 629–633)

When the group escapes Blade Island, Raten no longer hides behind Vorden's public identity. He takes control, introduces himself to Quinn as Raten, and helps resist the Blades pursuing Sil. At the beach, however, Sil can store only three abilities because Raten and Vorden occupy parts of his mind, leaving him unable to stop a water attack large enough to destroy the departing ship. The two conclude that deliberately fading their consciousnesses may restore Sil's six-ability capacity, although neither knows whether they can ever awaken again. (Chapters 664–668)

Raten accepts that uncertainty despite having long wanted a separate body. He tells Sil that he already died on the beach years earlier, that his continued fighting has been for Sil's sake, and that Sil should protect Quinn after he is gone. Raten and Vorden then disappear from the mental space; Sil's capacity returns and he saves the ship. Their choice turns Raten's protectiveness from coercive threats into self-sacrifice: he relinquishes the only existence available to him so Sil and the escaping children can live, while Quinn and the others refuse to treat his disappearance as necessarily final. (Chapters 668–670 and 794)

A mind restored in a living beast

Restoring Raten poses a problem precisely because he is a consciousness rather than an injured body. Richard Eno explains that returning him and Vorden directly to Sil would again reduce Sil from six stored abilities to three, so the group seeks separate vessels. Shiro receives the rare mind-transfer ability from a tablet and learns to connect mental spaces, extract the two dormant spirits from Sil, and place them elsewhere. The corpus demonstrates this procedure but does not give a complete biological or metaphysical account of how a spirit is stored, identified, or permanently integrated. (Chapters 1028, 1034, and 1120)

Shiro selects a demi-god-tier humanoid beast as Raten's vessel, but the transfer does not erase its resident mind. Raten's spirit is the first to come forward from Sil and is placed inside the beast's mental space, where Raten expects simply to take control. Instead, he confronts the original beast consciousness. In that mindscape he uses imagined daggers, lightning, and rapidly changing weapons, while Shiro observes that the effects may depend on powers Raten knew in life; because this explanation is Shiro's theory rather than a defined rule, the precise limits of mindscape creation remain unresolved. (Chapters 1168 and 1170)

The beast's memories reveal that humans experimented on it and that other beasts sacrificed their crystals to help it evolve. A resulting pledge allows Raten to control the body without destroying its original occupant. Once outside, his aggressive fighting style makes the same body move very differently, and he attacks Pure's leader while still recognising Layla as an ally. The arrangement remains shared rather than a clean replacement: the beast later speaks and takes control in its own right, proving that actions by the host must not automatically be attributed to Raten. (Chapters 1170–1173 and 1177)

The new vessel gives Raten exceptional strength and a body that can reshape earthlike flesh into blades and shields, but it removes the old Blade copy ability. Quinn identifies the host as a demi-god-tier humanoid beast nine percent of the way toward demon tier; Raten adapts quickly, whereas Vorden, restored into a different and voluntarily cooperating king-tier beast, needs guidance from his host. Raten then commits the regained life to the people the Temple once endangered: when Blade attackers board the Cursed ship, he rallies the children by recalling the suffocation of captivity, fights so they will not be taken back, and later tells Sil that common blood cannot determine who any of them becomes. (Chapters 1177–1195 and 1246)

Demon-tier war and another shared life

Raten and Vorden pursue evolution because stronger vessels would let them protect the Cursed faction and the surviving Blades. Their humanoid beasts can grow by consuming beast crystals, but the process has practical costs: large quantities are required, consumption causes weakness and hibernation while the body changes, and Raten's demi-god host begins much farther from the threshold than Vorden's lower-tier host. Hunting and gathering enough crystals on Blade Island eventually lets Raten's host reach demon tier. This progression belongs to the host body—called Muddy by its fellow beast—not to an innate transformation of Raten himself. (Chapters 1178, 1268, 1276, and 1281–1286)

The evolved humanoid body amplifies both Raten's strengths and his recklessness. He initially wants to test it against the demon-tier dragon, requiring Vincent to stop him from entering a suicidal mismatch. Against other enemies, he liquefies the mudlike body into the ground, changes its shape, and attacks with the close-range confidence for which he was already known. After masked attackers kill Wevil, Raten helps defeat the remaining assailants and recover the body, making the new power an instrument of loyalty as well as a source of exhilaration. (Chapters 1286–1288)

During the dragon campaign, Raten demonstrates the host's most consequential evolved effect: it can convert surrounding substances into the same mud from which its body is made. He transforms the ground beneath the dragon into an apparently bottomless mire and holds one leg in place, creating an opening for allies working from Sil's foresight. The application is environmental restraint rather than proof that Raten can overpower the dragon directly, and the corpus does not specify an exact conversion range, energy cost, or permanent duration. Raten admits that he had shown little of the ability earlier because he prefers hand-to-hand fighting, underscoring that his favoured style can conceal the vessel's broader utility. (Chapter 1549)

By the millennial era, Raten no longer operates in the demon-tier host. Vorden explains that Shiro transferred him and Raten through a succession of willing Blade descendants who lived their own lives and consented to the next transfer; reverse-aging ability use prolonged those lives, and Shiro was eventually placed into the current body as well. Raten can again speak inside the controller's mind and switch control, but the corpus does not narrate when the beast-host arrangement ended, what became of Muddy, or which descendant houses the trio at each transition. Those gaps make the latest shared Blade vessel a continuation of Raten's consciousness, not evidence that his original human body was restored. (Chapters 1704–1706 and 1921)

The last Blade campaigns

In the later shared vessel, Shiro, Vorden, and Raten retain separate roles. During their confrontation with the Marpo Cruise, Raten argues that fighting on the ship would exhaust the body's mental cells and that they should draw the enemy into a direct land battle; Vorden accepts the reasoning. Raten recognises the enhanced Dalki H as carrying Hilston-derived traits and watches Sil's subsequent fight from inside Shiro's mind. After Borden is killed, Raten insists that Sil will find a solution, but Shiro correctly realises that Sil intends to spend his strength teleporting the Blade family to safety and remain behind himself. (Chapters 2110, 2113, and 2116)

Stranded on the Amra world, Raten initially urges the Blades to meet any threat with force, then falls silent when Geo's strength exposes how little they know about the wider universe. The trio accepts Sil's exile as a chance to improve rather than merely hide. Adapting to the planet's gravity and climbing its tower force the shared body to use Qi more effectively; within that training, Vorden specialises in Qi and ability combinations, Shiro becomes the all-rounder, and Raten remains the best hand-to-hand fighter and user of short-range abilities. The division demonstrates cooperation rather than fusion: each takes control for the part of combat best suited to his own experience. (Chapters 2122, 2154, and 2173)

That cooperation is demonstrated against Russ. Vorden first uses water reinforced with second-stage Qi to break through shadow, then passes control to Raten, who coats his fists in flame and Qi and staggers a four-spike Dalki construct at close range. Later, Shiro switches repeatedly between Vorden and Raten while the Blades defeat a five-spike Dalki, though several of their people die in the fight. These victories establish the trio's improved teamwork without granting Raten the other men's specialties or Sil's six-ability power. (Chapters 2177 and 2245)

The arrival of the stronger H ends that optimism. Raten rejects despair and insists that the only remaining choice is to fight and somehow survive. When H releases a pursuing ice attack, Shiro yields control to Raten as the trio's most athletic member; Raten scales a building barehanded, but admits they have no power capable of saving the other Blades, who are frozen and killed below. The physical vessel survives, and Sil later thinks that Vorden and Raten would have wanted to join the final mission but were unsuited to it. Sil also confirms that he has used consciousness transfer for Raten, Vorden, and Shiro. No later chapter shows Raten receiving a separate body, so his latest established condition is survival within their shared transferred vessel, not an independently embodied life. (Chapters 2262–2263 and 2365–2367)

Appearance and personality

Raten has no stable independent physical appearance after his childhood body dies. In Sil's original body, he looks externally like Vorden and is distinguished mainly by a changed expression, manic grin, voice, and fighting manner. His demi-god host is a dark-brown humanoid beast whose earthlike flesh carries pale stone sections and a white stone head resembling spiked hair; its throat gives Raten's speech an accent. In the later era he again shares the outward appearance of a transferred Blade vessel with Vorden and Shiro, but the supplied corpus does not give Raten a separate latest form or a complete visual history of those vessels. (Chapters 44, 69, 629–633, 1172–1173, and 1706)

Raten is abrasive, profane, thrill-seeking, and quick to prefer violence, especially when he feels threatened or confined. He enjoys fighting, close physical competition, flirtation, and the sensation of controlling a powerful body; overconfidence can make him challenge opponents beyond that body's limits. Yet his loyalty is equally persistent. He protects Sil and Vorden, gives up consciousness to save Sil and the escaping ship, defends Blade children from renewed captivity, and argues that identity is chosen rather than dictated by Hilston's blood. His growth lies less in becoming gentle than in directing the same uncompromising temperament toward chosen family and survival. (Chapters 69, 287, 375, 620–668, 1168–1195, 1246, and 1286)

Powers and abilities

Raten's capabilities depend on which vessel he controls. His enduring personal strengths are consciousness, combat experience, aggression under pressure, and close-range skill. The Blade copying available in Sil's original body, the mud conversion of the humanoid beast, and the abilities of the later Blade vessel belong to those bodies; the corpus never establishes that Raten carries all of them independently between transfers. (Chapters 69, 241, 667–668, 1168–1178, 1549, 1706, and 2173)

Transferred consciousness and control

Raten survives the death of his original body because a rare mind-transfer ability places his consciousness in Sil. Within that body, an illuminated mental chair determines external control: sitting in it lets Raten move, speak, and use the vessel's available powers, while leaving it returns control to another occupant. Vorden usually regulates access, but the occupants can deliberately switch during combat, and Vorden and Raten can also fade their consciousnesses to release the mental capacity they occupy. Whether that fading would be reversible was unknown when they attempted it; Shiro later recovers their dormant spirits with the same class of transfer power. (Chapters 69, 287, 629–633, 667–668, and 1120–1168)

Transfer does not guarantee exclusive ownership of a new body. Raten has to coexist with the demi-god beast's resident consciousness, which can retake control under their pledge, and later shares a consenting Blade descendant with Vorden and Shiro. The corpus establishes repeated transfers and continued identity but not a complete rule set for compatibility, range, memory retention, failed transfers, or the fate of every host. His latest switches are coordinated rather than involuntary: the trio changes controller to match tactical needs, with Raten selected for athletic movement and close-range combat. (Chapters 1170–1177, 1706, 2110, 2173–2177, and 2263)

Blade copying in Sil's original body

While inhabiting Sil's original body, Raten can use its Blade copying ability. Physical contact acquires another person's ability, stored access normally lasts twenty-four hours, and the three resident minds allow three abilities to be retained at once. Raten uses copied telekinesis, earth shaping, spirit spears, teleportation, and other short-range tools with strong fighting judgment. More mental cells can strengthen an ability's output, as when he concentrates the combined support available from Logan and Cia into one unusually powerful spirit spear, but that expenditure leaves the shared body with fewer resources afterward. (Chapters 44, 69, 241, and 251–259)

The same arrangement imposes a severe ceiling. Sil's natural capacity is six abilities, but Raten and Vorden's presence reduces it to three; only their voluntary disappearance restores the full six. Skill also differs by controller: Raten can apply abilities efficiently in a fight, but Sil supplies greater raw power and Vorden is the more capable communicator and later Qi specialist. Once Raten is transferred into the humanoid beast he explicitly no longer has the copy ability, so none of its earlier applications should be treated as permanent powers carried by his consciousness. (Chapters 69, 133, 667–668, 1178, and 2173)

Combat skill and Qi

Raten is consistently identified as the close-combat specialist among his shared-body companions. He favours daggers, blades, fists, rapid counters, and short-range abilities, reads openings well, and adapts to unfamiliar bodies faster than Vorden. Inside the beast's mind he quickly learns to manifest and cycle imagined weapons, but Shiro only theorises that this mindscape responds to imagination and powers known in real life; the display does not prove Raten can create arbitrary weapons outside a mental space. (Chapters 69, 257, 1168–1170, 1178, and 2173)

The Amra world's gravity and tower training strengthen the later vessel and teach the trio to use its natural Qi more effectively. Raten is not called their best Qi practitioner—that distinction belongs to Vorden—but he can combine Qi with close-range abilities. Against Russ's construct he coats flaming fists in Qi strongly enough to stagger a four-spike Dalki, while the body's instinctive Qi protection softens an earlier surprise blow. No numbered Qi stage is assigned specifically to Raten, and the latest evidence establishes proficient application rather than independent ownership of the vessel's total Qi reserves. (Chapters 2154, 2173, and 2177)

Humanoid-beast vessel and demon-tier evolution

Raten's restored vessel begins as a demi-god-tier humanoid beast with exceptional physical strength, durable earthlike flesh, regenerative closure of holes in its body, and limbs that can reshape into blades and shields. The body can be pierced or overwhelmed by sufficiently powerful attacks, and Raten's initial control is constrained by the resident beast's continuing mind. His aggressive technique nevertheless makes the host more dangerous in direct combat than its earlier cautious style, and he rapidly learns to use its reshaping at close range. (Chapters 1168, 1170, and 1172–1178)

Consuming beast crystals advances the host through evolution, with weakness and hibernation accompanying the change. After reaching demon tier, the mud body can liquefy into terrain, reshape itself, and convert surrounding material into the same substance. Raten uses this to disappear into the ground, restrain opponents, and create a vast mud trap beneath the demon-tier dragon. The dragon application requires allies to exploit the opening and does not establish that the mud can defeat such an enemy alone; the corpus also leaves the conversion's exact range, duration, and energy cost undefined. This entire suite is last demonstrated in the beast host and is not shown after Raten enters the later human vessel. (Chapters 1178, 1268–1288, and 1549)

Relationships

• Vorden: Vorden and Raten begin as childhood peers, die in the same Temple trial, and survive together within Sil. They clash over killing, concealment, and who controls the body, but Raten repeatedly prevents Vorden from treating himself as expendable. After separate beast restorations, they eventually share another Blade vessel with Shiro and use their contrasting specialties as a coordinated team. (Chapters 69, 78, 287, 629–633, 667–668, 1177–1178, 1706, and 2173–2263)
• Sil: Raten is Sil's fighter, protector, and one of the minds whose presence initially limits his ability capacity. Although Sil killed Raten's original body during the Temple trial, Raten refuses to blame him for the institution's cruelty, sacrifices his continued consciousness so Sil can save the escape ship, and asks him to protect Quinn. Their reunion after Shiro restores Raten confirms that this loyalty survives death, guilt, and separation. (Chapters 69, 629–633, 667–668, and 1168–1178)
• Shiro: Shiro retrieves Raten's dormant spirit, places it into the humanoid beast, and later shares a Blade vessel with him. Their relationship moves from Raten belittling the inexperienced transfer user to a functional three-person partnership in which Shiro coordinates the vessel, Vorden supplies Qi expertise, and Raten supplies hand-to-hand skill. (Chapters 1120, 1168–1178, 1706, and 2110–2263)
• Quinn: Raten first treats Quinn as someone important to Sil and later explicitly asks Sil to protect him. Quinn supports the effort to restore Raten, evaluates and helps evolve his beast vessel, and fights beside the restored Blade group. Raten's loyalty is often expressed indirectly through protecting Sil, the Cursed faction, and people Quinn has accepted. (Chapters 69, 257, 664–668, 794, 1028–1034, and 1172–1195)
• Borden: Raten accepts Borden as part of the Blade family's chosen circle and fights beside him to protect its children. Advice from Raten and Vorden's humanoid beasts later helps Borden understand his incomplete Dalki body as a beast body that can evolve through crystals; Borden's death during Sil's later battle leaves Raten furious but unable to intervene from inside Shiro's vessel. (Chapters 1195, 1234–1246, 1781, and 2116)
• Hilston: Hilston is Raten's biological father despite the false family roles imposed on Blade Island. Raten fears his attention, despises the Temple and staged household he controls, and later defends Sil and the Blade children from the belief that shared blood must reproduce Hilston's cruelty. (Chapters 287, 620–633, 1195, and 1246)

Items

No individually catalogued item is assigned to Raten in the supplied manifests. He uses copied or improvised weapons in Sil's body, reshapes the humanoid-beast host into weapons, and later handles equipment belonging to shared vessels, but the corpus and inventory manifest do not establish any of these as Raten's sole personal item. (Chapters 69, 377, 472, 1168–1178, and 2154)